After studying at Tianjin and at Waseda University in Tokyo, Li became an editor for Xinqingnian (“New Youth”), the principal journal of the new Western-oriented literary and cultural movements. In 1918 he was appointed chief librarian of Peking University, and in 1920 he became, concurrently, professor of economy. Inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Li began to study and lecture on Marxism, influencing many students who later became important communist leaders, including Mao Zedong (then an impoverished student whom Li had employed as a library clerk).

When the Marxist study groups that Li had created evolved into the formally organized CCP in July 1921, he was instrumental in carrying out the policy dictated by the Communist International and in effecting cooperation between the minuscule CCP and the national leader Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party (Kuomintang). As a party leader, Li’s role was limited to North China. In 1927 he was seized at the Soviet embassy in Beijing, where he had taken refuge, by the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin, who had him hanged.

A seminal Chinese Marxist thinker, Li was more party theoretician than party leader. Like most of the Chinese communists of his day, he was intensely nationalistic before he embraced Marxism. Li was unwilling to wait for the international proletarian revolution to occur in the West and liberate China, and he was convinced that China’s small urban working class was unable to carry out the revolution by itself. Because of these views, he disregarded or played down the doctrine of proletarian class struggle presented in Marxism-Leninism. The communist revolution, in Li’s conception, became a populist revolution against the exploitation and oppression of foreign imperialism, with an overwhelming emphasis on the central role of China’s impoverished peasantry. In a country that was seething with national resentment against foreign aggression, chafing at its own backwardness, and composed chiefly of peasants, Li’s ideas had decisive relevance and formed the core of the thinking of Mao Zedong, who later formulated the military strategy by which the peasantry could carry out its revolution. After his death Li became the most venerated of Chinese communist martyrs.

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